Death Delights (40 page)

‘What’s it like?’ Greg asked his sister, ‘being in a coma?’

‘It’s like I was asleep,’ she said. ‘But sometimes I had really vivid dreams. I didn’t even realise I’d been in a coma until I woke up and they told me. Then I saw how wasted my body was. And I was pretty shocked. It was as if I saw what I was doing to myself for the first time.’ She looked around at all of us. ‘And because I’d been out of it in a different way for so long, I feel I’ve been away for a long, long time.’

‘You have,’ said my honest son. ‘It was hard when you were there, it was hard when you went. I suppose it’ll be hard for a while now, too, having you back with us.’

The awkward silence that followed his words was finally broken by Jacinta. She looked over at me and her eyes were luminous with tears.

‘Some time before I woke up,’ she said, ‘I could feel you there, wanting something from me.’

‘I asked you if you could help me from wherever you were,’ I said, feeling a little foolish at the admission. ‘I was desperate because Greg was missing. I needed some direction about where Kapit might have taken him.’

‘A lot of the time was just a black blankness,’ Jacinta said. ‘But I had nightmares, too, dreams and nightmares. I was in a nightmare just before I woke up. Some terrible dark world like an undersea place with these long cold tendrils and they were coiling around me. I was trying to prise them off, but for every one I pulled away, another two or three fastened onto me. They were revolting, like huge leeches. And then I thought I heard your voice, Dad. I tried so hard to get to you but I couldn’t. The leeches had me. I knew if I didn’t get away in that moment, I’d never get away, and I’d have to stay in that world. Your voice gave me some extra strength. I think I opened my eyes, but I’m not sure.’

‘You did,’ I said, excited that she remembered the moment. ‘I was sitting beside you. You opened your eyes and you smiled. But not at me.’ Jacinta looked puzzled. ‘You seemed to be looking straight past me,’ I said, ‘to someone else.’

Jacinta’s face lit up. ‘I remember now. I saw this beautiful girl, standing near the door. I felt so happy to see her. She encouraged me. Just by being there. I remember trying to say something, someone’s name.’ I remembered the whispered monosyllable and how it had finally led to Greg’s return to us. A shiver ran through me, but not of fear. Had Rosie been there too, helping me?

‘She wore a yellow sundress and a blue and yellow enamel necklace,’ I said.

My daughter’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘You
have
seen her!’ she said. ‘Who is she?’

I pulled out the photograph in my pocket and passed it over to Jacinta. Rosie smiled out at us again, the photographic image created out of the November sun and shadow of twenty-five years. ‘My sister Rosie,’ I said. ‘Your little aunt.’

Jacinta took the picture with her to the window again and studied it. Then she turned to me. ‘But how could I have seen her?’

There was nothing I could say. I looked over at Charlie. He shrugged. Greg put out his hand and Jacinta passed him the photograph. He frowned over it a few moments and then handed it back to her. She was about to give it back to me when she stopped. ‘This is so precious,’ she said. ‘Can I keep her?’

I nodded. ‘I’m having copies made,’ I said.

‘I’ll take her with me to Queensland,’ said my daughter. ‘She’s sort of a guardian angel.’

‘Can I stay here tonight, Dad?’ Greg asked. ‘I’d like to spend a bit of time with my sister seeing as she’s going away.’

I looked at Charlie. His shrug said ‘why not?’ and so it was that I drove home alone, feeling that many things were falling into place.

I couldn’t sleep for a long time thinking about Claire and Rosie and Jacinta so that when I did finally nod off, I went to a very deep place. From the depths of sleep I thought I remembered a crashing sound, as if someone had smashed a window. I sat up in my bed and gathered myself. I knew I was alone in the place, with Greg and Jacinta at Charlie’s and that no one could get in. The security grilles had been fitted while I was in Canberra. Every pane of glass in the place could be shattered and still no one would be able to get in through the grilles.

I stood up, breathing hard, shocked by this awakening, gathering my wits. A roll of thunder in the distance filled my hearing. Was that what had woken me? I strained to hear. Now I could hear nothing, except my own pounding heart and breathing. The house was quiet as the grave, and as dark. There was no ghostly apparition standing near the door. Navigating by touch and memory, and the very few visual clues, I walked out to the main room. I didn’t want to switch on a light just yet, wanting the cover of darkness. I could just make out the outlines of the table where I worked and boxes and cartons nearby. As I looked further, I saw that there was something wrong. My table and the cartons seemed to be covered in something that lay, in jagged shapes, like stiff paper cut-outs. I stepped further in to see what it was, reaching for the light switch. It didn’t work. I didn’t like this one bit. Some instinct made me pick up the bronze statuette of Kuan Ti from his position on the sideboard, and I gripped him hard as I went over to the table. As I came closer, I could make out shards of smashed fibreglass and for a moment I was completely bewildered.

I looked up towards the skylight over the table and thought I saw rolling storm clouds through the jagged gap. As comprehension hit me, something flew out of the darkness, crashing me to the ground. I felt the sturdy weight of Kuan Ti jolted out of my grasp and skid somewhere along the floor. I struggled and yelled but almost instantly my mouth was stifled. Whoever had crashed through the skylight in a hooded Tyvek spacesuit had me pinned to the ground, towering over me like some demented monk. I felt my windpipe closing in a choking cough. I couldn’t breathe. I heaved and struggled, fighting not only the hooded man, but my own system. Silhouetted by the jagged square of starry night that filled the ruined skylight, I could see his arm swing back and the outline of the raised knife in his gloved hand. I remembered the empty take-away container next to my startled photograph in the newspaper left lying on the dining table at Iona’s house. The mutilator had come to complete his collection.

As a coughing fit exploded through me, I was not the only one shocked by its force. He hesitated a moment in his deadly downswipe and, with all my desperation, knowing that another few seconds without breathing would leave me without any strength, I blocked the descending weapon arm as I’d been trained to do a thousand years ago, resisting the slashing arc with all that remained of my strength. The choking eased a little, enough for a sobbing breath and I started yelling, wordless noises, grunts and shrieks, as I fought my murderous assailant with everything I had. Terror speared up my spine, galvanising me: he was not going to get my balls without a fight. My supine position on the floor gave me little leverage and I knew my life depended on getting up. I was still weak and the strength of my right arm was failing as the killer pressed on it with all his strength and body weight. I managed another in-breath. If I didn’t make a successful move now, I’d be hacked to death just like the men whose deaths I’d investigated.

Rosie came into my mind and almost without thinking I yelled at him. ‘Rosie’s here! She’s come to get you! She’s by the door, you murdering bastard!’ His grip and pressure lessened by a fraction and in that split second, I made my left hand into a fist and lashed as hard and fast as I could into his body, somewhere near the upper right quadrant of his abdomen, punching him in the liver as hard as I could, following through the punch with a sideways roll of my body. It seemed to take forever. He doubled over around the assault and I kept rolling, out from under his weight, fighting to regain my feet. I was halfway up, but suddenly he was onto me again. His gloved hand smothered my face again, gouging for my eyes, the other at my neck and I realised he must have lost the knife.

This gave me renewed hope and I tried to push his hands away, but lost my balance again and tripped, jerking my head back, painfully colliding with Kuan Ti’s long pole-knife. I felt the rush of blood from the back of my head and the smell terrified me further. As I twisted around, I heard him scrabble on the floor and he’d grabbed the knife again and was slashing the floor where I’d been, but my body had jerked away involuntarily, from the pain of my injured head. Next swipe and the killer’s knife whistled past my nose and twanged deep in my polished floorboards. He dived onto it with both hands, pulling it out. I scrabbled behind my head, fingers closing around Kuan Ti. Julian Bower looked up momentarily to improve his positioning and I used that moment to smash the god of detectives, prostitutes and triads into his upturned face. I felt an initial resistance, then Kuan Ti’s pole-knife slid sideways into Julian Bower’s right eye, deep through the cortex of his tortured brain. He slipped backwards, screaming, a hand clapped over his face.

‘Where is she?’ I screamed at him, straddling him, beating his head with my bare hands, not caring that blood poured all over me. ‘What did you do with her?’

His screams had stopped. His one good eye opened and stared straight at me and it was like looking into the face of a demon from Hieronymous Bosch.

‘You’ll never find her,’ he choked. ‘She’s out of time.’ I wasn’t going to let him get away with that.

‘You killed her! You took her from us!’ I yelled at him, pulling his head up, banging it back on the floor, frenzied with rage and frustration.
‘Tell me where she is!’
I screamed.

But the dying man under me was past speech. Some last shred of decency forbade me from kicking him into eternity, so I crouched there, watching him die. Another person might have found some pity, maybe whispered some home-made prayer for him. Not this one.

•

After all the questions had been asked and answered, I sat with Bob while he brought the records up to date. The trail of violence that had started with the abduction of my little sister had ended now with me sitting in this office, writing my statement about the events of Julian Bower’s death. Now the case could be closed. It had been a long time coming. Bob and I talked, conjecturing what might have happened as we always had in the old days. The old pedophile and the young Bower boy had taken my sister. That was all I knew. Maybe one of them had killed her. Maybe the two of them. We had no way of knowing what had happened.

I went to an AA meeting because I needed to restore my equilibrium. After the formal proceedings, I was chatting to an old acquaintance, dunking a biscuit into a cup of tea, when a young tear-away who used to ring me when he first got sober and life’s events seemed more than usually difficult, skidded over. He was an inspector now at a suburban police station. We shook hands and chatted about the things that recovered addicts—along with the rest of the human race—find important: women, kids, work, loss, life, fun. He was just about to take his leave when he turned back.

‘You knew Marty Cash, didn’t you?’ he said.

I nodded, remembering the money now safely back under the floorboards in my bedroom.

‘I haven’t seen you around for a few months,’ he said, ‘so maybe you haven’t heard.’

‘Haven’t heard what?’ I asked, forgetting to undunk my biscuit.

‘He’s a vegetable now,’ the young bloke said and bounced away again. I was about to go after him and ask him for more details, but I was pretty sure I knew what had happened to Pigrooter. Feral pig hunting is a dangerous sport.

I abandoned my ruined cup of tea. One of the promises of AA is that providing we practise its principles in all our affairs, problems that once baffled us will fall away, and I felt a great deal better knowing that old Pigrooter had been removed as a threat.

I drove home with the plan for an extended trip around Australia becoming clearer in my mind. After Jacinta detoxed we could even fly from Darwin up north to parts of Asia, I was thinking. It would give me a break and time to write postcards to Iona. I had more than enough money now to do a few things I’d always wanted.

•

A week later, Jacinta, Charlie, Greg and I knocked on the door of the rectory at Springbrook and the vicar’s wife came to the door. I’d rung the day before, asking permission for what we wanted to do.

Mrs Bailey showed us around to the back again, past the low stone wall with the clematis that Charlie and I had encountered on our first visit here. Tall mountain eucalypts stood straight and slim at the end of the garden. Even the butcherbird remembered us, and his dying fall of rich notes pierced the air.

I’d bought a Peace rose and even though November wasn’t the ideal time to plant it, I wanted to do this for Rosie. I couldn’t bring myself to do it anywhere near our old home, because that was the place she’d had to flee. Just as my own daughter had done years later and Claire a generation before.

I didn’t want to plant it at La Perouse, because I knew that was only a transit home for me. I wanted to bring Rosie back from the men who’d killed her, and also celebrate my Jacinta’s home-coming, and planting this rose where Rosie had smiled in the photograph in the rectory’s peaceful garden, golden with sunshine and bees, seemed a good way to do it.

‘I want to put it there,’ I said, pointing to the wrought-iron grille just visible in the stonework some metres behind the sundial. ‘Just near where she’s standing in the photograph.’

Greg was standing up close to the dial, muttering his calculations of the seasonal corrections, trying to work out the time told by the pointer in the centre. ‘It’s reasonably accurate,’ he said, comparing the shadow on the dial to his wristwatch, ‘give or take quarter of an hour.’

Jacinta joined her brother, walking round the stone pedestal, following the inscription written around the sundial’s face.

‘
I will keep account of time until you are out of time,
’ Jacinta read out.

‘About here?’ Charlie asked, putting the rose down near the grille and looking back at me.

‘Maybe a little closer to the wall,’ I said. ‘That way it’s protected from the wind.’ Roses are pretty tough but they give more if they’re happy about their position and wind is always a problem for growing things. A whirlwind of the Lord, I thought briefly, reminded again. Then the words my daughter had just read out from the sundial floated into my consciousness. ‘Read that again, Jass,’ I asked as Charlie repositioned the rose bush. ‘Read out those words again?’